Daniel Hauser was executed by the State of Florida for the murder of Melanie Rodrigues
According to court documents Daniel Hauser wanted to know what if felt like to kill someone and would pick Melanie Rodrigues at random. Melanie Rodrigues would be strangled
Daniel Hauser would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Daniel Hauser would be executed by lethal injection on August 25 2000
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When Was Daniel Hauser Executed
Daniel Hauser was executed on August 25 2000
Daniel Hauser Case
Dan Patrick Hauser has waived all appeals and fired his attorneys since admitting that he killed a Fort Walton Beach dancer. Okaloosa County sheriff’s investigator Stan Griggs got a call from the county jail Dec. 12, 1995. Dan Patrick Hauser wanted to talk to him. The month before, Hauser had pleaded no contest to first-degree murder for strangling 21-year-old topless dancer Melanie Rodrigues in his Fort Walton Beach motel room. He had not been sentenced for the crime, but prosecutors wanted the death penalty. Griggs went to the jail at 10:45 p.m., and Hauser handed him an envelope. Inside were two handwritten pages from a yellow legal pad, filled on both sides with a confession that would seal Hauser’s fate. Hauser is to be executed by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Tuesday at Florida State Prison in Starke. It’s what he wants. “Those who commit murder are a different kind of people,” said Robert Augustus Harper, a Tallahassee lawyer Hauser fired. “To commit self-murder is in effect what is being allowed here, using the instrument of the state instead of a piece of a bedsheet.” The pages Hauser gave to Griggs that night in 1995 lay out the cold details of a murder.
“She was small, easy to overpower and new (as a dancer), yet still making money,” Hauser wrote in the confession, explaining how he picked Rodrigues from among dancers at a topless bar to lure back to his motel room with the offer of $200. There, she danced naked for him again, and they had sex twice before she stood up to leave, he wrote. “I stood up at the end of the bed and asked her to give me a hug,” Hauser wrote. “I was standing there in front of her thinking, ‘This is my last chance; if I want to kill her I am going to have to do it now!’ “So just as we pulled apart, I put my hands around her neck and threw her on the bed. . . . I put only enough pressure so she could not scream. I wanted to watch the fear in her eyes. I let up so she could take a breath and just stared at her while she started to lose consciousness, then let her breathe again and said, ‘Well, this is it.’ I put as much pressure as I could and held it until she gave this shake and her body tensed up then went limp.” He stashed Rodrigues’ body under a bed, cleaned up the room, and began driving west. Because Hauser had rented the Econo Lodge room in his own name, officers were able to track him to an RV park in Reno, Nev. He liked the feeling of power over Rodrigues while he was killing her, and thought about killing other women before and afterward, but didn’t, because “things just didn’t work out,” he told Griggs. Hauser told Griggs, ” ‘I’ve always been for the death penalty, and I’m not going to change my mind because I’m in hot water,’ ” Griggs remembered last week. Since then, Hauser has fired his attorneys and waived his appeals in neat, handwritten motions he mails to court.
Still, the Florida Supreme Court held an appeal hearing, and Gov. Jeb Bush held a clemency hearing against his wishes. Both upheld the death sentence. Lawyers with the Capital Collateral Counsel, who represent indigent condemned prisoners, filed 150 pages of motions this week on Hauser’s behalf but against his wishes. Hauser is a bipolar manic depressive who needs medication, and that makes him legally incompetent to represent himself and waive appeals, CCC lawyer Gregory C. Smith contended. Hauser made up the terrible details he included in his confession after researching aggravating factors in the jail library to ensure he would be sentenced to die, Smith argued. Before that, he had told investigators and his lawyers he was confused and anguished about the crime and could not remember exactly how or why it happened. The Supreme Court ruled Friday that CCC had no right to help Hauser against his wishes.
Hauser’s adoptive parents in Oregon find the situation too painful to talk about. Smith’s brief says they apparently support their son’s decision to be executed. Rodrigues’ mother said she remains filled with anguish over the loss of her only child, a kind-hearted girl who loved the beach and went out of her way to help friends. Rodrigues helped manage a Destin convenience store and danced at Sammy’s on the Island only as a temporary second job, Pamela Belford of Fort Walton Beach said. She wants Hauser to die. “He’s not going to put another family through this,” she said. “He’s not going to take a beautiful human being and take her life.” Prisoners executed in Florida since 1976 spent an average of 11.3 years on death row. Because he has not fought his sentence, Hauser has been there just 4 1/2. Many of the 370 Florida death row inmates have been there more than 20 years. Still, on June 29, Bush chose Hauser to die next.
The lack of appeals “obviously moved it to the top of the stack,” Bush’s spokeswoman Elizabeth Hirst explained Friday. “It was appropriate timing for the warrant to be signed.” When the state changed its primary method of execution from the electric chair to lethal injection in January, Bush also signed a law that would have taken away the right for condemned prisoners to file many appeals, shortening the typical stay on death row to about the time Hauser has served. The Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional. Unless Bush suddenly changes his mind before Tuesday night, or a court intervenes against Hauser’s wishes, he will be the fifth person Florida executes by lethal injection.
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